Christmas 2009 in Silver City

A White Christmas in Silver City, New Mexico

This year my family and friend Efrain spent Christmas in Silver City, New Mexico. My family is from there, and my parent's house is a little more comfortable for a large number of people than my one bedroom apartment.

When driving from Albuquerque to Silver City, one has two main options. One option is to cross the mountains through NM 152 and drive through Hillsboro on the east, the black range of mountains, and then come out in Mimbres on the west and continue on to Silver City. The other approach is to continue south on I25 until Hatch, take the NM25 through Hatch and to Deming, then take NM 180 up to Silver City. Both routes take approximately the same amount of time if the speed limits are heeded, Hatch-Deming can be much quicker if you choose to speed.

Going through the mountains is a much more scenic and pleasant route, but passing through the flatlands of Deming and Hatch has a significant advantage - Deming has a country club which my family can play handball at! One of our favorite things to do as a family is to play handball. I got into town a little bit late to play on the way in, but we were able to play on Christmas Eve.










Here is one short video of my mom verses Alan. Additional, longer videos are coming soon.


In total, Alan Gast, Colleen Stinar (my mom), Donald Stinar (my dad) and I played in Deming this time. Efrain wanted to stay in Silver City and work on a welding project, so he wasn't able to make it. Autumn Stinar (my sister) was working at her new job at the Javalina Coffee Shop, located in downtown Silver City.

Autumn M. Stinar working away

Numerous Patrons of the Coffee Shop

My family also likes to eat sandwiches from Diane's Bakery Sandwich Shop, also located in downtown Silver City. Outside the sandwich shop, the entire block was transformed from a somewhat run down industrial district into a beautiful commercial area with about four different eating establishments.

Frozen Fountain in Downtown Silver City

Efrain R. Grijalva at My Family's House

One of the nights in Silver City, my family went to eat dinner at Isaac's, also located downtown. We saw our friends the Kellerman's. Travis Kellerman was visiting from Albuquerque and his mom Karen and father Harry retired to Silver City.

Travis Kellerman - Albuquerque Politico at Isaaic's in Downtown Silver City

Efrain R. Grijalva - Low Light Conditions at Isaac's

I also spent a lot of time working on backups at my parents medical office. My father has all of his patient records stored electronically, and I am his system administrator. Performing a test restore on a new server is important, but not something that many would consider interesting.

Jalapeno Popcorn

This weekend I accompanied my girlfriend and a few of her friends to see the Twilight Movie, New Moon. Despite living in New Mexico for over ten years, I still find certain things interesting. One example of such a thing is the delicacy know as "jalapeno popcorn."

Luckily, I was not accosted for recording elements of the new movie, nor for taking unauthorized photos of people. The couple in front of us was enjoying this jalapeno popcorn.

Car Auction

My friend Oleg and I attended a car auction here in Albuquerque. We went to observe and measure how the car prices compare to similar cars on Craigslist. Our comparison is still in the works, but I would say on average the cars are slightly higher priced, but the outliers are significant.

Bentley's Auctions had a DWI seizure auction and I thought it would be fun to attend. New Mexico has a significant problem with drunk driving, and the state decided it would be a good idea to take someone's car after a conviction, so I thought I would see if I could buy someone's car (cheap), but they weren't quite cheap enough to motivate me into buying anything immediately.

Below are some pictures of the auction, and below that I have some video.

The auction had a bit of a carnival feel.

New Mexico used to have a single zip code, "505", which was the subject of many tatoos. Unfortunately, we now are 505/575, which doesn't look quite as good. 5{0,7}5 is also an option if you know regular expressions.

My friend Oleg

Hot Tub Moving Project

My house in Albuquerque is rapidly getting fixed up and becoming more comfortable, but there is one critical element missing, my hot tub. The past two weekends I have come to Silver City to help my parents with their computer network, to visit, and to work on getting my hot tub up to Albuquerque. Last weekend, we were very short on workers and I didn't make any progress on preparations for this project (but the network admin stuff came along well.) This weekend, it will be close in terms of labor. The work crew is going to make an attempt tomorrow.

Today I spent about three hours demolishing my father's float setup on his flat bed trailer. Silver City has a Christmas parade and a 4th of July parade, and my dad always enjoys creating comic floats that somehow incorporate the parade theme, promotion for his business and humor. The trailer had a wood frame to facilitate the attachment of lights and decorations, but it was fairly rotten. The flat bed trailer is barely too small for my hot tub (the width of the trailer is 76 inches and the hot tub is 79 inches wide.) My general plan is to put the tub on the side, with one edge propped up against the trailer railing. Hopefully the fiber glass liner and pseudo-wood exterior are able to withstand the force of the tub! I'll help my dad rebuilt the float setup before the next parade, I am grateful I do not have to rent a trailer for this project.

While living in Socorro, my car suffered thousands of dollars worth of damage in the massive hail storm. Rather than using the insurance money to fix my car, I realized the damages were entirely cosmetic and I did not want to concern myself with appearing to drive a stylish vehicle. Instead, I realized that I could use the money to accomplish one of my dreams, to have a hot tub at my house as an undergraduate student.

I am not Asian, but this is the specific model. If you want to come and use it, send me a message!


This is the actual color of mine.

I got a "Tiger River Bengal" one of the more inexpensive models made by Hot Springs. My family has always been very satisfied with Hot Springs hot tubs and I look forward to improving my back yard with this addition.

Leader Tech

I have been greatly enjoying my new job at a small software company in Albuquerque called Leader Technologies. The job is right next to the north diversion channel trail, so I can ride 9.3 miles each way to work safely, I work on very applicable projects which customers are interested in, and I work closely with very intelligent and nice people. Overall, I am very glad I choose to experience private industry.

Lately, I have been working on a number of data visualization routines. When I first started here, I was working on a general framework to replace our existing chart generation software. I have some before and after pictures. Before and after pictures are usually interesting, either with houses, people's physique, or computer programs. These before and after pictures aren't the most stunning things in the world, but I thought my blog would be a good venue to share what I've been up to.

These are generated with Java code, using the JFreeChart graphing library. Currently, I am working on a project to apply some of these chart types to visualize our mail server's log, so our customers will be able to understand what is going on with our system in a visual way.

VBAR - Before

VBAR - After



VSTACK - Before


VSTACK - After




PIE - Before



PIE - After (3D)



PIE - After (2D)



HSTACK - Before




HSTACK - After




LINE - Before




LINE - After



AREA - Before



AREA - After

My friend Kate has been a very positive influence on my life and helped me shape my thinking. She is always interested in improving herself, and helping others improve. Based on her suggestions, I came up with a list of goals I would like to achieve and set my mind to them. I have been in the process of coming up with new goals, and I wanted to analyze my older goals. I thought I would post the analysis on my blog for my friends and family to read and comment on.

1.) Pay off car in 8 months (in account or paid)
* My cousin and I were involved in a car wreck and we owed the rental car company most of the money for the car. I was able to talk them out of about 25% of what they wanted us to pay. My cousin was an unauthorized driver, and I made a mistake authorizing him to drive. We went half on the expenses, even though I was 100% financially liable. The situation was pretty bad, but I am grateful that my cousin and I were able to talk and be involved in each other's life during this period. I was able to accomplish this within a month of setting my mind to it, mostly because of my cousin’s agreeability, good fortune and hard work.


2.) Finish Computer Science Masters Degree
This goal took a little bit longer than I was planning on, but thinking clearly about this definitely helped me choose which path to take. I was able to get my masters degree in May, 2009. Based on this goal, I choose to present my research to a board of professors instead of writing a thesis. I believe a thesis would have taken an additional 6-12 months to complete, and my goal was to get a masters degree, not necessarily a masters with a thesis. If I had cemented this goal into place earlier, and taken action based on that realization, I would have been done even earlier. Without it, I would have finished much later.

3.) Have Kate Johnson as a Girlfriend
This is the only goal I feel like I completely failed at. I focused too much on a lot of the negative aspects of our relationship, and failed to focus on the larger commonalities we share. Sometimes with concrete goals they are not achieved and this is one of those instances. I know I made a lot of serious mistakes with Kate and I can learn from those mistakes. I feel lucky that we are still friends. This is a goal where breaking it down into manageable chunks would have been good.

4.) Make Progress Towards Starting a Business
* MBA?
* Capital?
* Rental Property
Develop more specific goals towards this.
I was able to purchase some rental property and develop myself in that way. Without the support of my family, my old land lord Bob, my friend Oleg, and Kate pushing me to develop specific goals, this would have never happened.

5.) Write one letter or card per week to someone I care about
For this one, I started off really strong. However, things slowed down towards the end and eventually I forgot about it. I think I made a mistake by not keeping up with any kind of milestones, reminders or quantitative analysis of this. When I make a goal like this in the future, I plan on including a very detailed break down of it.

6.) Develop writing + web authoring skills further
My blog is a testimony to my web authoring skills, as is my learning of ActionScript. I finished a SANDReport for Sandia that will someday make it through review and approval, and I have another SAND report in the works. I feel pretty positive about this one.

7.) Learn how to make ceramic tile
If Kate didn't push me towards concretely writing down my goals, I never would have stepping into the UNM craft studio and learned how to do this. I feel like I accomplished this one. However, I still need to complete my table!

8.) Show more compassion
- listen more
- no interrupting people's sentences
For this one, I think I did better in general, but I still need to work on this. If I had done really well, I don’t think #3 would be a failure. Again, I feel like for these non-specific goals I need some sort of way to quantize them to make them more approachable on a day-to-day level.

9.) Stay Positive
This one has gone well. I find that if I stay very active, the positive outlook comes along.

10.) Practice Handball More
I think this one also went well. I went from a low B / high C player to a very solid B player. This one could have used more specifics and quantization, but still I feel good about it.

Google Voice = Awesome

I was selected to participate in the new "Google Voice" closed beta test. So far, I love it! It's really cool being able to route calls to whatever phone you are currently at. Since I work inside a secured area, and cannot bring any personally owed electronics in (no cell phones) it makes giving people my work number a pain. However, Google Voice changes all that. Try clicking on the below link to give me a call using it!



In order to change the phones Google Voice will ring to, you need to authenticate that phone with the system (entering in a 2-digit code.) I think this is to make the service useful, as opposed to annoying by allowing arbitrary dialing and receiving of telephone calls (phone phreaking).

Here is a screen shot of how I can change the phones Google voice will ring on:

When I am at work, I just forward all my calls to my work number. Once I get off work, I have them forwarded to my cell phone. It's really easy and convenient.

I hope to post some additional screen shots to my blog showing how cool this service is. If anyone has any specifics they want to know, just send me a comment. Hopefully this isn't violating the terms of the beta, but if it is, google should "do no evil" by gently reminding me before pulling the plug!

I just wanted to throw this post up really fast so people could try calling me with the embedded button.